J.C. Hutchins' techno-thriller novel 7th Son: Descent hits bookshelves today, but the story has already had a long life as a popular podcast. The audiobook versions of Hutchins' 7th Son trilogy have been downloaded and enjoyed by tens of thousands of listeners, which caught the eye of St. Martin's Press. Now you can hold the first volume of 7th Son in your hot little hands, knowing you're part of something that's been in the making since 2002.

The story follows the lives of seven strangers who are brought together in a government lab, only to discover they are all clones of the same man. Not only that, but the man they were cloned from is a remorseless killer with access to some mind-bending technology. Human cloning only scratches the surface of the action in 7th Son. Hutchins' rendering of the interactions between the seven clones, each with distinct personalities, is masterful.

If that's not enough to tantalize you, you can grab a free PDF of the novel, and check out a series of seven audio prequels, 7th Son: 7 Days, that explores the lives of the clones before their abduction.

Meanwhile, Suicide Girls sat down with Hutchins to get the story on 7th Son: Descent, the future of the trilogy, and even a possible Hollywood movie.

Jay Hathaway:7th Son already has a big following from its release as a podcast, but for everyone who's starting with the print edition, what's this book all about?

J.C. Hutchins:7th Son is a modern-day thriller with science-fiction elements in it. It's in the same genre as a Michael Crichton book. 7th Son is about seven guys who live in different parts of the country, who are kidnapped after the president is mysteriously murdered by a 4-year-old boy. They're brought together at a super-secret government facility, where they are told that, despite some cosmetic differences, they have been unwitting participants in a human cloning experiment. And yes indeed, they look the same. Some are fat, some are thin, but they're cut from the same cloth, and they have the same recorded childhood memories from birth to age 14. They've been a part of a nature vs. nurture experiment called Project 7th Son. They were never intended to know that they were part of this project, and they were never intended to be brought together but the folks who founded this experiment discovered who was behind the murder of the president. It is their genetic progenitor, the original John Michael Smith, the guy whose memories and flesh they share. They were cloned from him, and they've been brought together to track him down and figure out what he's up to next.

JH: So, you're sitting down to write your first novel, and you decide "I'm going to have seven protagonists?" Isn't one hard enough to write?

JCH:7th Son started as a concept for a superhero comic. Not just any superhero comic, but a team superhero comic, like Justice League of America. The concept was to tell the story of seven guys who were cloned from a grizzled old war veteran. A general in his 80's or something like that. The best damned war hero from World War II. They had his recorded childhood memories, and they had superpowers. There was going to be an issue with them wrestling with memories from the early 20th century, while living in the 21st century and having capes and spandex and rayguns and all that. I used to report for Wizard, the comics magazine, and I encountered comic book scripts from masters like Alan Moore and Warren Ellis. I was like, "There's just no way." I was so familiar with prose writing, 'cause I was a journalist at the time, that I didn't think I had it in me at the time to write a script format. So I decided, "Let's write it as a prose novel." I didn't think that the superhero genre I've been proven wrong since wouldn't really stand up in prose fiction format. So let's make these guys everymen. So really what it was is that I came up with the title "7th Son," and I was like "Well, what does that mean?" And then it went from there to the super hero team concept, and now it's still kind of a superhero story, it's just that these guys are far more normal, despite their extraordinary origins. I guess if I can write a book with seven protagonists, I can do anything now. I can't wait to write my next book, it's going to be about a guy peeling a label off of a beer bottle, and that's going to be it.

JH: With no verbs.

JCH: With no verbs! It's just going to be him sitting and pondering paint drying, or something. Yeah, it was kind of challenging, but one of the things I've learned is that having so many characters in a particular room, you have to think like a camera. You have to make sure that the reader is reminded that there are people in this room. You have to bounce from one character to another and glance and do all this, so that really helped me paint the visual picture of a scene, and helped me understand that you can't give characters short shrift in these scenes. Everyone has to contribute.

JH: Different readers are going to be drawn to different clones, and you must have favorites yourself. How do you decide how much screen time to give each character?

JCH: Yeah! The characters who have more screen time are the characters that I personally liked. There are a few characters, like the character who was formerly called Jonathan [in the original 7th Son podcast], now called Jay I just didn't find him very interesting. [laughs] How can I put this in more diplomatic terms? I think the more odd or everyman it's either of two extremes: the well-grounded individual such as John gets a lot of screen time, because he's probably one of the most easy to identify with for most people. But these characters represent different facets of people's reactions to human cloning. And so, the priest a great many people in this country are religious and spiritual, and I felt obligated to have a priest represent the struggle that these folks might have, and the dialogue that we might have someday when human cloning is real because that's such rich territory, he gets a lot of screen time. And of course, the crazy person, the oddity, Kilroy 2.0 the computer hacker gets a lot of screen time because he's so interesting, because he's so broken. He has his own kind of transformation throughout the story.

JH: And because, when you recorded it, you had fun doing his voice?

JCH: [laughs] I sure did! I totally did. That was one of the challenges of doing the 7th Son podcast the first time around, back in 2006. What do these people sound like? I never considered myself a voice actor before I started doing 7th Son, but one of the things I realized is that if I were to simply read their dialogue and not put a performance into it, it may be hard to aurally track who's who. I don't know where Kilroy's voice came from. When I was writing the novel years ago, that's not the voice he had in my mind, but it just kind of happened. Frankly, I'm glad it did, because people seem to love his performance.

JH: Which clone's attitude about cloning most closely aligns with yours?

JCH: Wow. Um. I'll kind of go down the list. John has a very secular reaction to it, like "I am not a unique snowflake, and that kind of sucks." He's alarmed. Father Thomas has a crisis of faith. Michael the Marine seems absolutely nonplussed. He's just a "take life as it comes" kind of guy. Kilroy 2.0 celebrates the fact that, after being a conspiracy theorist, he is actually conspiracy himself. He personifies it. He loves it. Jay kind of looks into the governmental and regulatory issues of all this, and the legality of it. Jack represents the ethics argument: just because we can do this, scientifically, doesn't mean we should.

For me, I'm okay with human cloning.I think that this is going to happen, and I have a really open mind about it. I think that we'll certainly see organ harvesting hailing from human cloning. Will we ever see the kind of full-body replacement that is seen in 7th Son? Well, that greatly hinges on the ability on the ability to record human memories and implant them in a human brain, which is also seen in the book. When that happens, the legality of if you've got a 90-year-old version of yourself, who has opted into the cloning and memory injection process, you would basically have a 20-year-old version of yourself, with a 90-year-old's experiences in his mind. What happens to the 90-year-old person? Does he relinquish his possessions and his marital status and all of the things that come with that? Those are the things that are going to be the hardest for us to wrap our heads around. Does he opt in to euthanize himself?

JH: It's interesting that the book is coming out in the middle of a huge national healthcare debate in the U.S. So if human cloning is the answer to anything, people are going to ask ... who pays for it? This technology you're writing about can't be cheap.

JCH: Ha! Right. And I know this is the conspiracy theorist in me speaking, but I'm absolutely convinced that an institution has already started cloning humans. How could that not be? But the human cloning thing isn't really the issue, because you're just replicating flesh. We could clone a person and raise him like you would any other child, and because of the whole nature/nurture thing, you would have a completely unique and completely different person. The real ethical debate for me is the concept of recording human memories. I don't think we're going to be there for a while, but human ingenuity ... it's gonna happen.

JH: Do you think that readers 25 years from now will find the controversial parts of 7th Son commonplace or kind of quaint?

JCH: God help us if it is! And I don't really mean that in a serious way. But I do think that cloning human flesh, if it hasn't already happened, it will. We've already figured out how to destroy memories. One of the technologies in the book is called Nepth Charge, and that will wipe out a person's memories completely. I'm sure that one could do that with a ray or a sonic whatever. There's got to be a way to create that kind of ruination in a human's mind. I'm not even addressing the ethics of it, I think that's rotten. Injecting memories into a blank brain or even a healthy brain ... that's the thing that we may see within 50 or 100 years. The question will be, if we can record a human memory, do we really need this meat machine that we are occupying? Are there more efficient ways that we can exist, without requiring a biological sack?

One of the things that inspired 7th Son was a book written by Ray Kurzweil called The Age of Spiritual Machines, in which he talks about human consciousness, and our consciousness existing on a kind of neural Internet. If we can record human consciousness, why would we need to exist in the real world, when we could exist in a neural, virtual world. That got me thinking about recording human memories and using that in 7th Son. Really, we're either going to one of two ways: either we'll figure out a way to traverse the need for a flesh sack, or we'll put memories into human brains and see the technology that we see in 7th Son.

JH: What's the status of the other two books in the trilogy? Do they have release dates yet?

JCH: We don't know. One of the things that is so critical about 7th Son's release is that the first book in the series is the only one to have been picked up for release at this time. A lot is riding on this, because it requires the book to become either a critical or a sales success to justify the additional expense of acquiring the sequels. I'm turning to my fans, both old and new, and saying, "These are stakes. If you want the sequels in print, there's only one thing to do, and that is to bring it!"

JH: How about the movie adaptation of 7th Son? Any progress there?

JCH: The trilogy has been optioned by Warner Brothers. I'm certain the studio will be looking at how this book does with sales. It's moved from being an option to being "in development." That means it's been announced by the production company, Unique Features. These are the dudes that produced the Lord of the Rings trilogy and I, Robot. They know how to adapt big stories into film. The last I heard from my film agent and this was a month or two ago was that a screenwriter had been assigned to it, and that he was nearly completion of the first draft.

JH: Who do you think could play all seven of these guys?

JCH: When I was writing 7th Son, I never had a person in mind. A lot of writers will mentally cast their characters as they write them, and sometimes even include descriptions like, "He looked like Harrison Ford." For me, I never had a mental image, besides basically an anybody. The only actor I ever thought of while I was writing 7th Son was General Hill, who is a very imperious, tall and commanding military dude in the book. I thought of the guy who played President Palmer in 24. I think he would be a great General Hill. Now, after the fact, I'd love Ryan Reynolds to play the clones. Ryan Reynolds is best known as being a comedian, but he's also been in some great action pictures. He's ripped, he's a good-looking guy, he's funny, and he was also in a comedy in which he wore a fat suit so hey, there's Kilroy. I think he has the charisma to pull it off. Frankly, I wouldn't kick Brad Pitt out of eating crackers in this bed. Or Will Smith. They could change it to Jane Alpha and hire Angelina Jolie, that's fine by me.

JH: For fans of the podcast, has anything about the plot changed for the print edition?

JCH: The only small regret I had about the 7th Son Book One manuscript that I recorded in 2006 was that we hear a lot about the villains in conversations with our heroes, but we don't see the villains until at least the halfway point of the book. I thought it would be a good idea to see them earlier in the novel. I actually wrote two completely new chapters you haven't seen 'em, you haven't heard 'em that are basically the machinations of the villains. We get to seem them doing horrible things to people. I wanted to introduce them early in the story to personify the threat and create more dread about what they were up to.

JH: With so many books out there that try to tap into a reader's sense of fear and dread, how did you go about coming up with something new for people to be scared of?

JCH: I've thought about this a lot. What I'll often do is I'll play the What If? game. What would be a good idea for a story? Because I love science fiction, but frankly, I really enjoy writing science fiction set in present day, I think that it's far more accessible for a reader to read a story that takes place now, that features kind of futuristic technology than to set a story 100 years from now, when there are flying cars. You can't really intuitively identify with a flying car. I like to make things as accessible as I can for my readers.

I think that while vampires are hot they're clearly hot in the literary scene and in the movies right now, lots of supernatural terror the future of fright is in technology. Constant variations on Pandora's Box. A great many of the ideas I have for future books have to do with technology gone bad. And it's that five-minutes-into-the-future technology, so while it may be completely preposterous, it seems likely.

JH: So you take on the role of a futurist, the guy who's anticipating stuff that could realistically happen, because real is scarier. What sources do you mine when you're doing that?

JCH: Ray Kurzweil is still a really good source of inspiration. His most recent book, The Singularity is Near, is a story bible for shit that could go wrong. He looks at it in a very optimistic way, as he should. This guy is a bona fide futurist. I'm just a futurist wannabe. He's a leader in the futurist space, and I look at his optimistic projections and figure out ways to ruin the world with them.

I also listen to a radio program that I subscribe to as a paid podcast, called Coast to Coast AM. This is a late-night talk show that either tells the truth about a great many conspiracy theories 2012 and the Mayan calendar and UFO abductions or it's just great entertainment.

JH: So it's right up Kilroy 2.0's alley.

JCH: He would listen to Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM, absolutely.

JH: Is finally having 7th Son in print anything like you imagined it would be?

JCH: This is living up to my current expectations, and the expectations I've had for the past few years. Before I finished writing 7th Son, I had the great mis-notion, as all newbie writers do, that all you need to do is finish writing the book and send it to somebody, and then everything magically happens and you get a check for a million dollars. Which is the biggest heaping pile of bullshit that you'll ever, ever think. I think that releasing my work in podcast form, and the vociferous promotion that I had to do with that, and the networking and the hard work, that has managed my expectations. Just because you build it, or in this case, print it, that doesn't mean people will come. A lot of this is me continuing to do what I have done for the past three and a half years. I haven't even had time to process the idea that this book is going to be on shelves.

JH: Did you have each character's backstory completely worked out before you knew you were going to write the 7th Son: 7 Days prequel stories?

JCH: One of the things I knew I couldn't do was write sequel content. The second and third books have already been written. Writing stories and I have a great many of them outlined in my head that take place after Book 3 wouldn't make sense, because no newcomer can really appreciate that. So I decided to take the story back and write stories that took place two weeks before the events seen in 7th Son: Descent. I wanted to give an opportunity for readers to experience the life of the clones before they were clones. The moment your novel starts is when your character's life is changed forever, and in the instance of 7th Son, I took that quite literally: in the first chapter, I kidnapped all of my clones. They were all ripped away from their normal lives, and so we never really saw their normal lives.

Did I know these people's lives when I started writing 7th Son in 2002? Not entirely. But I saw this as a great opportunity to flesh out what I did know about them. I don't write full character sketches for my heroes. I don't know how well that serves a novel. If you're spending more time writing biographies of your characters than you are writing your book, well, you'll never get your book written that way. What you see on the page is often just about all I know.